Oak – Improving Call Recording in Financial Services

Maximising uptime and reducing risk for business critical scenarios

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Oak Innovation Financial Call recording
Unified Communications

Published: December 7, 2018

Dominic Kent

The UK has 58,000 businesses trading in financial products or advice. This makes the FCA, and MiFID II a big deal.

The independent regulatory body is licenced by the UK government to enforce regulations that deter, detect and prevent abuse and malpractice in the financial markets, and by the EU to oversee the implementation of MiFID II in the UK with a similar intent.

Under the guidelines of the FCA, organisations must provide a visible audit trail of activity surrounding the enquiry, purchase and sale of financial products and services. This includes recording and storing phone conversations with clients, traders and internal staff, for up to seven years.

Long term call recording

Call recording specialist, Oak Innovation, recognise that regular access to is no longer common place in business. However, when faced with a customer dispute or compliance challenge, they provide essential information about who said what. Since the introduction of MiFID II, failure to comply can result in fines of up to 20% of turnover, not to mention damage to reputation. In 2017 alone, the FCA issued fines totalling £229,515,303.

Richard Garel-Jones, Product Director, Oak Innovation said

“Organisations no longer purchase call recording simply for the recording functionality, but to ensure the long term security of their financial actions”.

Planning for the future as well as the present

Common issues of scalability, storage and the potential impact of an interruption in service are still overlooked when implementing call recording today. Unlike many other real-time applications, a failure may not be immediately apparent, but the consequences of missing information may be significant.

Richard also commented, “At Oak, we ensure there are deployment options available to maximise uptime and counteract long term risk”.

Compliance

Compliance is one of the chief reasons that businesses look to Oak Innovation for recording applications. With vast experience in the field, Oak note the following checklist as crucial when implementing call recording.

Your solution, deployed your way

Oak solutions work with on-premises and cloud telephony. You can choose to deploy the recording application itself on premises, in a virtualised environment, or from a hosted service provider ‘as a service’.

Some financial firms prefer to retain control by storing recordings on premises, readily available and easy to find. Others make use of emerging low cost cloud storage for long-term archiving.

Identify issues ‘in the moment’

A problem with your system that causes it to stop recording may not be your fault, but it is your responsibility. The higher levels of Oak’s new SupportX service now include a clever health monitoring service identifies and flags issues when they occur to minimise disruption.

Health monitoring services attempt to correct critical software failures and notifies your admin as well as the Oak NOC (Network Operations Centre). In addition, this service can be configured to monitor and report on usage, performance and memory. This gives you insight into potential issues before service is affected.

Maximise service availability

Should a primary call recording system fail, due to software or hardware issues, redundancy provides a back-up to make sure no calls are lost.

Voice traffic is captured by primary and secondary recorders. If there is an issue with the primary system, the administrator will be alerted and can migrate the missing calls over from the back-up. This removes any vulnerable points of failure.

If there’s an issue with the server hardware or host, both primary and secondary recorders continue to capture calls until the server is back online, when the recordings can be uploaded once more.

To learn more about improving call recording availability for your financial service with Oak Innovation, visit the Oak Innovation website.

Call RecordingSecurity and Compliance
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